COMMUTE.

Do you know why someone who regularly spends a certain amount of time traveling back and forth between home and work is called a “commuter”? It’s because the first people so called were using commutation tickets, what we now call season tickets, that commuted (‘changed,’ from Latin commutare) a bunch of daily fares into a single payment. (If you check the foreign equivalents linked at the left of the Wikipedia article, you find that a number of languages use a word or phrase meaning ‘pendulum migration.’)

Public transport dismal? Awful?
I would trade the occasional public inconvenience for my daily dose of agression, danger and delay in the high speed, congested world of the private car. And if you think high speed and congestion is a paradaox vist the M5 motorway near Bristol,at eight o’cock in the morning. The upside is, at least you get to work wide awake and fizzing with adrenalin.
Oh for a train…

Public transit in NYC is utterly normal and even classic. In many cities it’s an overflow backup system and has an unpleasant feeling about it. Portland Oregon is fine, but still not good enough to be the primary system for most people.

The Japanese Wikipedia article for a “pass” is at 定期乗車券 teiki-jōsha-ken (meaning something like ‘set period travel ticket’) and it links to… (tra-la-la) “Season ticket” at English Wikipedia! Is this a British/American thing? (The German equivalent article is at Abonnement, Russian at Абонемент.)

Honolulu has a pretty comprehensive and reliable bus system. My wife and I were able to live without a car for two decades, until our daughter needed something to learn to drive. Now she lives in Boston and rides the T. And now we have a car and are enjoying exploring parts of the island we rarely visited before.
Re Abonnement: I believe symphonies and other seasonal performance orgs refer to their season ticket holders as subscribers.

Abonnement is Norwegian too. Season ticket in England, in addition to Covent Garden and so on, is or was used for prepaid train and football-match passes, but not for cricket- or bus passes (as far as I know).
I would trade the occasional public inconvenience for the occasional public convenience.

In Cisatlantica, a “Symphony” can only ever be the thing that gets played. I can’t think offhand how we abbreviate “Symphony Orchestra”. If I ever went I might know. How do y’all abbreviate “Chamber Orchestra”?

Do you need a proverbial penny ?
I would trade the occasional public inconvenience for the occasional public convenience.
I. The action or process of conveying.
1. Convoying, escorting, or conducting; conduct. Obs.
or convenience, n.
2. The action of carrying or transporting; the carriage of persons or goods from one place to 3. Carrying away, removal, riddance. Obs.
another. (Formerly used more widely.)
1. a. Agreement, accordance; congruity of form, quality, or nature. Obs. gynandromorphous,
4. Moral or ethical fitness; propriety. Obs.
7. (with a and pl.) a. A convenient state or condition of matters; an advantage.
d. A particular appliance; a utensil; formerly applied commonly to a conveyance; now often used euphemistically, spec. a (public) lavatory, a water-closet; esp. in public convenience.

Abonnement: In France this is a subscription, either to a newspaper or magazine or to a season for the theatre, ballet, opera etc, but also to the telephone or other public utility. But I don’t think it can be used for public transportation. Bus or commuter train tickets can be bought either singly or, more economically, through weekly passes or sets of 10 tickets, but that is not considered an abonnement (Perhaps it is because of the short-term nature of buying such tickets, as opposed to the expectation of continuing delivery of magazines, plays, etc with the abonnement). I am not familiar with the world of spectator sports.

And addition and multiplication are commutative because they have tickets to go back and forth.
Then there’s the electrical device, the commutator, which switches current back and forth in DC motor– all tickety boo, I suppose.

And you can support my book habit without even spending money on me by following my Amazon links to do your shopping (if, of course, you like shopping on Amazon); I get a small percentage of every dollar spent while someone is following my referral links, and every month I get a gift certificate that allows me to buy a few books (or, if someone has bought a big-ticket item, even more). You will not only get your purchases, you will get my blessings and a karmic boost!

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From "commonbeauty"

(Cole's blog circa 2003)

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